Thursday, March 31, 2016

Medieval times in Europe
were pretty much all about binary code, at least from the point of view of
literate monks. Good and evil: saints and sinners, heaven and hell, men (good)
and women (bad), mind (good), body (bad), celibacy (good), sex and dancing and
other associated activities (bad). Etcetera. In many ways this was terrible:
and when we look at it in context, it may just be that this paved the way for
the kind of rational either/or thinking that defines the modern Western world,
and ultimately… perhaps… leads to the invention of the computer. Computers are
machines based around two discrete possibilities – on or off. 0 or 1. Right or
wrong. They are, in their whole conception, products of left-brain-style
polarity. If quantum physics is based on the strange concept that there are
both points and waves in light; then the wave aspect is quite foreign to the
computer and its cultural origins. A computer “wave” is made up of discrete
pixels.

The computer is rather strange for other
reasons too. Silicon, the substance that made the revolution in computing
possible, is deeply related to carbon, the basis of organic life. In fact it
mimics its chemical structure in all kinds of ways, such that it was long
speculated as a possible alternative elemental basis for life on other planets.
However, it plays another role entirely in the soil, and in plants, animals and
humans; a potentially deadly one. Rudolf Steiner had much to say about
silicates, but one image that sticks is his description of silica as a
“corpse”. To be sure, there is a lot of other fascinating stuff to be worked
with around the elements involved in maintaining life, and the role of carbon
in the plastic elements of computing is massive in the hardware. Yet I am
struck by this use of this strange, mimicking, “dead” element at the basis of
our polarised modern technology.

It is masculine, to define it in a modern
way, involving the aspect of the bigger polarity of life that delights in limits and boundaries. Oops, here I go defining things too in polarities! Well, there's no harm in playing with polarities. In fact, one of the great hilarities of life is that it's pretty impossible not to. So let's play.

According to this game, what would a feminine computer look
like? Clearly this would have to be concerned more with continuity and infinity.

Consider the case of the largest number
with a defined name – a googolplex. Not the corporation HQ but the very large
number. If a googol is 10 to the power of 100, a googolplex is 10 to the power
of a googol. This number is considerably larger than the number of atoms in the
known universe. In fact, even writing it is quite a feat. Consider that the
processing power of our current computers doubles at present around every two
years according to an observation known as Moore’s law. It is in fact currently slowing
somewhat so isn’t really a “law”, butlet’s use it as a principle
for our calculation. According to this, computers are nowhere near being able
to write this number yet, but, if processing power hypothetically continues to
double every 2 years for the next 400 years, it would then be worth starting to
write the number around the year 2400. And once it is finally worth attempting,
it would take 4 years to do so, and use up more material than there is matter in our solar system to actually write the number out.

Pretty impressive, right? And still a
finite number made up of 1s and 0s. And the infinite possibilities unleashed by
a feminine computer operating system would be as far off as ever.

Perhaps the quantum generation of computers
will actually look rather different, I hear the geeks respond excitedly. And
while they head off to investigate and invent, the Divine Feminine will stand
aside and applaud them on with congratulations – and offer up titbits of wisdom
they’ll call intuition as they solve these problems en route to Windows ∞.0. Bless them!

But of course the feminine computer already
exists. We are all computers created on feminine principles. Organic, using
carbon for our intelligent electrical impulse transmissions, working with waves
and imprecise movements; continuously changing and flowing with infinite
possibility and potential; a holistic, right-brain-style of looking at the
world, connected to every other element of life around us instinctively,
intuitively, sensually. If we can only get our heads out of those social media
silicon messages we might realise the incredible potential our designs have
installed for us.

And contained within the feminine, of
course, is the masculine. For, as Rilke knew, “the deepest experience of the
creator is feminine” – not masculine. This is not the mirror of those medieval
monks denying the feminine; it is the One
from which the two emerges joyously as a dance of life. While Mani was being
crucified for the heretical belief that good and evil both had a place in the
manifested world, the East was of course celebrating the yin and yang as equally
vital and inter-related; from the fluid interplay of Shiva and Shakti emerges
the constantly-changing universe. Baby boys are just baby girls who’ve
diversified according to the cosmic game of creating two to play.

So this “masculine” technology we have
devised is an aspect of this, a brilliant mirror of our own innate potential
and a rich line of enquiry into possibility; and at the same time, in its
shadow aspect, technology is a manifestation of our own sense of inadequacy, of
needing to create something outside ourselves to solve our problems and
entertain our distractable souls.

The genius of the organic world is only
just beginning to be understood. As biodynamic and intuitive agriculture
teaches us the weird and wonderful intelligence at play on the cosmic computer
that is Gaia, we find fungi who munch up deadly toxic plastics, we find carbon
promoting charcoal forms that densify soil and attract more rain, we find food
substances that drastically alter the spectrum of what we can experience in our consciousness,
we find we can communicate with animals after all and that there are forms of
language and connection we used to relegate to the world of children’s books.
The next unicorn is just around the corner, and it will certainly not be the
product of genetic engineering. The wonder of this massive feminine
computer (which forms an incredibly beautiful network, that we’re already part
of, and which Apple’s ergonomics team would die for), does not need us to
develop it; it simply needs us to understand it so we can work and play
alongside it. The game, ladies and gentlemen, has indeed begun.

Monday, March 28, 2016

The sight of a massive, pristine sand dune, inland
from the Atlantic coast and surrounded by hardy bush, is one surprising sight
on the R27 home. Feeling a little bloated from fish coated in a disturbingly yellow
batter, and chips which I hope were made from those prize local Sandveld
potatoes (hiding beneath the spartan soil), I am bemused by the
uncharacteristic grey skies above, which, today, make the whole setting
resonate with some cross-dimensional intrusion from an inadequate north
European seaside holiday. Perhaps the one I had on my 8th birthday,
eating sausages in Belgium
in the rain.

If South Africa is the most beautiful
country in the world, officially, then the officials probably visited the West
Coast/ Weskus in the spring, when a smorgasbord of flowers drown the mixed metaphors
of travel writers. At other times of the year, the specialness of the region is
a little harder to nose out. And the moonscape close to Koeberg, Africa’s only nuclear power plant, probably needs to be
regularly ignored. My daughter reveals that she took this name rather literally
in the past, imagining some kind of enclosure for rampant radioactive electricity-generating
vegetation. There was a veld fire around here recently, it seems, and the
impact on these sandy flatlands is more dramatic than in the mountains: bush
cover reduced to charred stumps in the midst of sandbanks. Elsewhere, by contrast, the wind farms of tomorrow are beginning to dart across the low western hills.

Yet there is a precious wildness, when one
gets away from Koeberg, or from Saldanha (that dark Satanic mill at the
steel-making end of the interminable Sishen train line). Even Velddrif, where
we stopped in the Easter takeaway queues for those fish and chips, had its
share of gulls eager for the scraps my children threw, while coasting proudly
into the windy gusts off the Atlantic, or
racing down to the beards of seaweed clutching at the shore. We looked at the
ocean and talked of the lives of albatrosses, riding the air in a way so
foreign to us landlubbers.

The West Coast has featured rarely in my
travels, and perhaps because of this the memories it evoked today were strong
ones: riding our way across that bridge over the mouth of the Berg River, here
where it emerges so far from larney Franschhoek, spotting the pyramids of salt,
and flamingos in the pink pans, like further up in Namibia at Swakopmund. And
we pass the game areas: !khwa ttu San heritage park (where I once took 10-year
olds on an exciting adventure into Bushman culture); the West Coast National Park, with its riot of
birdlife and wetlands. Close by, camping long ago (before children) with my
lovely young wife, we’d gone horse-riding on a beach, an experience she was
skilled at, and at which I was a complete novice, taken for a gallop, careering
up the other rocky side of the beach, and staying on most likely through the
sheer folly of not expecting to do anything else. This tale, today, is
recounted to my horse-mad children yet again, for I have been led to a
fascination myself with these creatures, who I still know so little but who I
can see today in a far richer way than was possible back in the class-bound
Britain of my childhood (where horses were for toffs, and that was all you
needed to know about them).

That distant trip was in spring, of course.
I recall a hike through the floral magic of the National Park, a picnic on some granite
rocks; our first grateful taste of “corn thins” together, which somehow were
superior to the rice cakes and avo we had previously survived on; and a fat
puffadder sitting in the tar road in the heat of the day, while we drove past
in her brown Beetle, and I wondered casually if a pofadder might be able to
leap through an open window.

Today we return home to the warmer waters
of False Bay, where organic coffee is easily available, where yoga classes are two-a-penny
(and not railed against by crucifix-trundling coastal preachers), and where
English is frequently heard. Even here, however, there is wildlife creaking
beneath the smiles, and – thank the gods – those grey skies are bringing some
serious rain.

About Me

Hailing from Muizenberg for the last 16 years, and Cape Town since 1996, I was born in the culturally independent state of Norfolk, known to the uninitiated as a flat county in the east of England. I often get away with being taken for South African these days, which is as I generally prefer it. 'n Pom maak 'n plan, as no-one has said yet. I am a ‘Transformational Energy Activist’ working in a range of environments with the principles of positive transformation. My exploration of this concept has evolved into many more holistic methods since my initially academic excursions. I have also worked for 12 years in the creativity-based Steiner/Waldorf school system; and am a performer in a number of fields.